One or more embodiments of the disclosed technology relate to an organic thin film transistor array substrate and a method of manufacturing the same.
Organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) are a kind of thin film transistors with an active layer made of an organic semiconductor material. Compared with the inorganic thin film transistor, the OTFTs have the following advantages. More methods, such as a Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) method, a molecular self-assembly method, a vacuum evaporation method, an ink-jetting print method and the like, can be used to prepare an organic thin film, thus the manufacture processes can be simplified and diversified and the manufacture cost can be reduced. The devices can be made in a smaller size, thus the integration level can be increased, and in turn the operation power can be decreased and the operation speed can be increased. In addition, in the case where the active layer is made of an organic semiconductor material, the electrical properties of the active layer can become desirable by modifying the structure of the organic molecules. The organic materials may be obtained in an economic way and sometimes the manufacture process of the organic field effect transistors (FETs) do not need strict control on the atmosphere conditions and the purities, thus the manufacture cost can be decreased. In addition, the transistor totally made of the organic materials has excellent flexibility and light weight. In addition, it is reported that the electrical properties of the device is not significantly affected when the device is appropriately twisted or curved. Such excellent flexibility further expands the applications of the organic transistor, for example, the organic transistor can be used in the fields of flat displays, sensors, memories, RF IDs and the like. Based on the above advantages, the research and development on the organic thin film transistors are widely performed.
Some manufacture processes have been developed to fabricate the organic thin film transistor array substrate; however each of these processes needs 6-7 patterning processes. During each patterning process, a mask is employed to obtain the film pattern (for example, circuit pattern) by applying photoresist, exposing, developing, and etching, and the mask is needed to precisely provided on the film patterns which have been previously prepared. Therefore, these manufacture processes need a number of masks and are complicated, and the manufacture efficiency is low and the manufacture cost is high.